“Would you like to use the browser by Company X, or the browser by the company that survives on half-a-billion dollars a year from Company X, or the browser by the company that gets paid an estimated $20 billion a year by Company X even though it can survive without it?”
We desperately need a web browser by an independent organisation funded by EU taxpayer money and maintained for the common good.
@aral The problem with the modern web is the utter complexity that causes hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on its development. We the community must ignore the "open web" specifications dictated by trillion-dollar corporations, and focus on a sane and stable subset that can be easily implemented by the community.
@xavi92 I like this. My only addition would be that the browser manages “identities” for people so that Small Web places can communicate with each other via end-to-end encrypted messages.
Without controlling the browser that functionality requires JavaScript currently.
Otherwise, without JavaScript how do you propose ajax-style updates? With a declarative extension to HTML (eg., the functionality of htmx baked in, perhaps?)
@xavi92 … Although there are lots of tiny experience improvements that are currently only available via JS: eg., a chat window scrolling to the bottom when new messages are received, etc.
I guess you could similarly extend HTML to bake common behaviors in but I do feel having a client-side scripting language is a feature, not a bug. Especially since it can be used by the community to create the cow paths that get paved declaratively layer on.
@aral OTOH I feel a lot can be already accomplished with HTML5 and CSS. Extensions are interesting, but I think compatibility with existing web browsers (i.e., small web sites are still accessible from common web browsers) is key for adoption. Otherwise, it might face a similar situation to Gemini, which made itself effectively incompatible with everything else, now becoming a niche protocol.
@xavi92 Thing is, unless we have identities (e.g. you have your own secret key that you can use to communicate with other Small Web places privately), we’re not solving the issue of privacy on the web. So if we want to attempt to solve that (which I do), we either need JavaScript (so secrets can be generated on the client) or extensions. I agree with you that compatibility with existing browsers is essential (or else, like you said, there’s Gemini) so I feel we need (a subset of, at least) JS.
@aral We can then look at this from a different perspective: instead of bundling a JavaScript interpreter into a small web browser, features such as identities could be implemented by the browsers themselves, natively. Then, servers can still serve JavaScript to common web browsers to maintain compatibility.
This would avoid the need for JavaScript on small web browsers, and it should considerably easier (and more secure) to implement such features individually than relying on JavaScript.
@aral I am aware JavaScript might come in handy for nice little experience enhancements, although I feel JavaScript on a web browser is sort of a double-edged sword, because it has suffered from ever-increasing scope and has been also used for malicious purposes, such as cryptomining or browser fingerprinting. These things must not be allowed to ever happen again.
@aral I still can't wrap my head around how these multi-trillion markets are still not strongly supported by the world's governments. Just toss money at web browsers, it's like literally the easiest future proof investment into economy and society you can make. We all need this shit and will need it for the foreseeable future.
@aral Ah, thanks. I thought Arc was not yet funded.
I like the way Orion sounds so far, but the current crew seem to have escaped from some of the worst big tech companies, so I’m waiting to see what they build and with whom.
@aral You are right, but it isn’t a new browser we need, it’s just Mozilla Corp that desperately needs to fire its greedy CEO and needs to shift to public money (of the EU).
@aral what we need is to get off the web: much of its 'content' is increasingly abysmal; it's deeply flawed technically as an application delivery platform; and engagements on it are driven by deliberate attempts to hijack your focus, time, data, money, and mind in the service of profit and in exchange for ads, malware, surveillance, and misinformation.
@aral The internet is now something that should be a right for every person to access in a healthy society. With an increasing demand for a digital interface to perform even the smallest of tasks, if someone is forced to be “offline” due to financial circumstances then it can become very detrimental to them. It seems like a crazy idea to some, but if you are unable to get a job that offers insurance or that pays well enough without accessing the internet then there's your answer.
Both companies’ web #browsers trace their origins to #Mosaic by The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (#NCSA).
#Microsoft#InternetExplorer was based on code licensed from Spyglass, a #Mosaic trademark and technology licensee who had supposedly only used the original code sparingly.
@aral The salient point is that although both companies’ #browsers did not appreciably derive actual mechanisms (code) from #NCSA, they would not exist without #NCSAMosaic’s initial research, design, and refinement.
So both @kpeace and @keithzg are correct depending on one’s perspective.
@mjgardner@kpeace@aral To clarify, my initial assertion was directly and specifically in regard to KHTML (which Apple adopted essentially wholesale as WebKit, and from there Google adopted that and birthed Blink/Chromium). But the clear history of the first permutations of web browser lineages is interesting and appreciated!
@keithzg@kpeace@aral I’ve got no issue with private companies being inspired by or directly forking #OpenSource projects as long as they obey the licensing terms
@mjgardner@kpeace@aral Oh man, that's a good question! I personally started using Linux a few years after khtmlw became #KHTML so I don't even have any real guesses beyond what I can reconstruct from timelines I know of retroactively; I wonder what the Linux browser landscape looked and felt like at the time. Maybe like me those folks spent most of the 90s enjoying the simplicity of #Lynx!
@mjgardner@kpeace@aral I was imagining something a bit different but not wholly dissimilar, where the devs only had easy access to text browsers on their preferred and/or personal systems but, having seen GUI browsers in Mosaics lineage on other platforms, were inspired to pursue creating (or joining in the effort and bringing to fruition) one themselves. But I'm sure there were GUI browsers inspired or directly derived from Mosaic available on Linux at the time, I just don't know what they were. I do vaguely remember some #Netscape versions being ported over in the late 90s?
#Konqueror was probably even inspired in some ways by Internet Explorer to be entirely honest — by the time I encountered it in the early 2000s it was already a full browser of both the web and of filesystems (both local and network)! Which naturally meant tabbed file browsing and pane-splitting and such, which blew my mind at the time and which most other systems still haven't fully caught up with. If you had told me at the time that Microsoft would eventually switch to using #KHTML before they finally added tabs to Windows Explorer I would have laughed at your outlandish science-fiction tale; history takes strange turns.
@aral
> i desperately wish millions to be robbed and their money used for another dead-on-arrival EU project where 99% of the money goes to corruption and bureaucracy because that will solve monopoly and show the lolberts!
how about instead just not using all the EEE bullshit that is shoved into web browsers? thus removing the power google has? all without robbing people!
the only excuse i can think of is that your government forces you to use a web service which only is usable with those browsers. for which the correct action would be fixing that governmental service.
@aral It would also be nice if company X didn't create so many new web standards that only company X and large companies like it have the resources to implement them all. The current web standard is larger than the documentation for the x86 instruction set. Nobody except large, well-funded teams could ever hope to develop a fully compliant web browser in their lifetimes.
@aral Firefox, Chrome (as Chromium) are already open source. Reinventing the wheel isn't always the solution! Especially browsers which need to keep up with the spec every now and then. PERIOD
@aral Agreed. The EC should fund Igalia to work on Firefox and bring it in line with EU privacy rules. Essentially, it should just wholly take over FF.
@aral This is exactly the conversation I had with @Patricia a while back https://distributedfutu.re/episode68.html
If I remember correctly maintaining a subscription based fork of either is a Multi million a year commitment - but that just means you need a few million subscribers.
@aral
I was a bit sceptical at first, but when I learned Mozilla chosed to not implement DANE validation (which permits to detect MitM), the problem appear clearer to me.
@aral I support your goal, but I don't understand, what would the EU write, exactly? If the core is open source, would they make apps? Who would use them? I am dismayed at the shrinking of the open web behind a few corporations products. How would another browser change any of these dynamics, don't you really need users? This is mastodon's problem, there is some software written, it mostly works, certainly as well as twitter did for many years, but other than us few, where are the people?
@alexmckenna@aral Bouncing off it because of confusion, ui/ux, racism, superior attitudes or because their friends are still on x,y,z.
What he's proposing isnt just a browser, its an entity big enough to protect web standards from corporate abuse and restriction. The EU is big enough to fit the bill and should really look at funding a browser and web standards agency that commits to keeping the web free and open for all citizens, the benefits of which would be felt more widely.
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